What a way to run a government:
For more than a year, the Treasury Department has grappled with a monumental global economic crisis while many of its most senior people have had to walk out of internal meetings at critical moments and have been barred from joining in-depth exchanges with foreign governments.
That's because the appointments of these officials have been blocked at times by various Republican senators. Until now, their reasons for thwarting the Treasury have been largely unknown beyond the halls of Congress.
It turns out the sources of discontent apparently were not the appointments themselves. In one case, it was a tax penalty on small businesses. In another, the passage of an anti-tobacco plan in Canada. Yet another involved a tussle over online gambling....
Some Senate GOP aides said Bunning wanted to see the Obama administration more vigorously oppose a plan by the Canadian government to ban fruit-flavored cigarettes. The Canadian initiative, which was intended to curb youth smoking, could hurt Kentucky tobacco farmers.
The rules of the Senate allow Senators to basically stop any presidential appointment at will for any reason at all. I'd love to change this arrangement, but apparently it's exactly how the Founding Fathers designed the system to work so we can't change it.